The Snake and the Spider Read online

  At the other end of the line, Officer Ray Burnham wrote down the information. “We’ll check it out this afternoon and call you back.”

  “Okay. Thank you. We’ll be waiting.”

  Next he called the Barbers and told them what was happening.

  “What can we do while they’re checking out the information you gave them?” Marian asked, her voice shrill and nervous.

  “All we can do is wait,” Roy said. “We’ll call you when we hear back from the police.”

  “I want to do something more than that.” She was frustrated and Roy could understand. But at this point there was nothing they could do but trust the police. With all those places that had taken Jim’s traveler’s checks something was bound to turn up. Perhaps the boys had been in a car accident in Mississippi or were stranded on some deserted stretch of highway.

  “The police have done this kind of thing before, Marian. They’ll probably have good news for us by this evening.”

  “Well, I hope so. We’re going crazy over here.”

  “I know, believe me. We feel the same,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Hang in there.”

  When the conversation ended, Marian buried her head in her hands and began to cry. Her husband moved quietly beside her and stroked her head.

  “They’re going to be fine, sweetheart,” he said. But he had lost his conviction in the matter and Marian could hear it. She looked up, tears spilling onto her face. For the first time since the boys had gone, Ron Barber wasn’t completely calm about the fact that his son had not returned home from vacation.

  “You say they’re fine, but you don’t believe that, do you?” she asked fearfully. “You don’t really believe they’re all right.”

  He waited a fraction of a second too long and then, unable to speak, his eyes grew watery.

  “I want to believe it, Marian.” His voice cracked and he clenched his fists. “You don’t know how badly I want to believe it.”

  He had taken the day off so they could make phone calls or drive somewhere or do whatever had to be done to find the boys. But only now had he finally admitted to himself that something was wrong. It was one thing to go an entire week without calling and even to be a few hours late coming home. But Daryl and Jim would never have been two days late without calling. Besides, it was Monday. Daryl was supposed to be back at work.

  Ron had called his son’s boss earlier in the day and asked if they had heard anything from him.

  “He’s late for work, I know that,” the supervisor had said a bit gruffly. “What happened? I thought they were on vacation.”

  “Well, we don’t really know what’s happened,” Ron had said. “He said they’d be back Saturday, back in time to get to work and all.”

  “He’s not here yet and normally he would have been here an hour ago.”

  “Would you mind calling us if you hear anything from him?”

  “Sure,” the supervisor said. “And if he goes home first, tell him to call me. I need to know if he’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Just so you know, we do have the police looking for them, too.”

  At the mention of police, the supervisor had seemed to soften. “Gee, sure hope everything’s okay.”

  “It is, I’m sure,” Ron had said. “Just probably one of those stupid things kids do.”

  But now, several hours later, Ron had lost all his optimism. He reached out for his wife and as they embraced, they both began to cry in earnest.

  MEANWHILE, OFFICER RAY BURNHAM AT THE MICHIGAN State Police office had spent two hours making phone calls and was frustrated at the lack of information he’d been able to get. He had been assigned the missing persons reports on both teenage boys and so far had learned just one thing—the location of the phone booth in Ormond Beach where Jim had called his father. Ormond Beach, Burnham had learned, was the first town one comes to when driving from the north toward Daytona Beach. It would have been easy, he reasoned, for the boys to reach the city and call home thinking they were in Daytona Beach when they were actually still several miles away.

  Apparently that was the last time anyone heard from the boys and this concerned Burnham a great deal. He did not know Jim and Daryl, but he knew several of their brothers and sisters, many of whom had been friends with his children over the years. The Barbers and Bouchers were good people with a strong allegiance to family. Boys like that would have called home. Especially when in the days that followed they were seemingly busy cashing traveler’s checks.

  Burnham had also contacted each of the establishments which took the traveler’s checks from Jim. He made a point of talking to whoever was working the day the checks were cashed, in hopes of finding someone who might recognize the boys.

  “We’re looking for two teenagers who cashed a traveler’s check at your business on the thirteenth of August,” he informed the manager of Majik Market. He went on to describe the boys’ appearance and then he paused. “Sound familiar?”

  “Look,” the man said. He had a thick New York accent. “I was working that day so maybe I should have remembered those kids. But I don’t remember nothing. We get traveler’s checks around here all the time. Don’t take time to remember every face that comes through the place. Understand?”

  Burnham thanked the man for his assistance and called the other establishments. Each time, after describing the boys, he was met with the same response. No one could remember two teenage boys having been in their business and having used traveler’s checks. Finally, Burnham was out of leads. He sat back in his chair and gazed out the window at the lush green that surrounded the station.

  The way he saw it, there were two problems with this missing persons case.

  First, the boys were usually responsible kids who under normal circumstances would have called home every few days. Actually, the way these kids were, they probably would have called every day and maybe even every night. Since they hadn’t, Burnham could hear bells going off.

  The other problem was that although the traveler’s checks were signed by James Boucher, no one at any of the establishments where they were cashed remembered the boys. That led Burnham to one rather obvious conclusion: The boys hadn’t cashed the checks. If someone else had cashed the checks, it was possible they had been stolen and that the signature of James Boucher was actually forged.

  Those two details made it almost impossible to consider this merely a missing persons case. But still, there was no concrete evidence to suggest that the boys had been victims of crime. And considering the fact that they were teenage boys—as were so many runaways—Burnham knew what most officers would do when given the case. Shelf it. Keep an eye out on the streets for the kids, but never put any real time into investigating the case until there was proof that a crime had been committed.

  Unfortunately for the Barbers and Bouchers, Officer Burnham knew the case would not likely receive much attention. The parents were worried sick and he wished there was something he could do to ease their fears.

  Finally he did think of one way he might be able to help. He picked up the phone and dialed the Daytona Police Department. Dispatch connected him to the department that handled missing persons.

  “Detective Mikelson,” a voice said.

  “Yeah, this is Officer Ray Burnham, Michigan State Police. Got a missing persons case for you.”

  He rattled off the information, promising to mail pictures of the boys and copies of the missing persons reports that afternoon.

  “Listen, Mikelson,” Burnham said before he hung up. “Put some time into it, will you? These were good kids, boys got along with their parents, good jobs, money in the bank. The thing smells real fishy from where I’m sitting.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” Mikelson sighed. “Every time a kid disappears in our precinct it smells fishy. This is the beach, remember, Burnham? Daytona Beach.”

  IT WAS THE NOT KNOWING THAT WAS SO VERY DIFFICULT, causing a frantic fee
ling that only worsened with each passing hour. There is something internal built into a parent that connects them to their child. And when that child is missing, the parent searches every horizon, every hiding place, everywhere possible in an effort to find the child. Constantly searching. Because as long as that child is missing, there is no rest, no peace. It matters not whether the parent has lost a toddler or a teenager. The child must be found if life is ever to regain any semblance of normalcy.

  When two months had passed, with the police in Michigan and Florida working to no avail to find the missing teens, their parents finally reached a breaking point. They were losing precious time with each passing day, and the pressure of not knowing where their sons were, if they were alive or dead, was destroying them. Day and night they racked their brains for possible explanations for their sons’ disappearance. And in return they were continually assaulted by waves of panic as they realized that, indeed, there were no explanations, nowhere even to begin to look for them.

  And so on Monday, October thirtieth, disillusioned by the efforts of law enforcement, they hired Private Investigator James Byrd of Detroit. They were not for a moment concerned about the price of such an investigation, but only about finding their sons. Their entire lives had been reduced to a single goal, a single purpose. The boys must be found, whether they were alive or not. They agreed that nothing could be worse than not knowing the answers, regardless of what those answers were and what it might cost to get them.

  “Don’t worry,” Byrd said when he spoke with the parents that morning. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to find your boys.”

  Ten minutes later Byrd did just that.

  He called Private Investigator Bob Brown of Orlando, Florida, and hired him to solve the case.

  CHAPTER 5

  Bob Brown was not surprised when he took the phone call about the missing teenagers. He was, by that time, a nationally recognized private investigator and many times other investigators hired him to work on local cases.

  Of course, as far as the clients were concerned, hiring an investigator who then hired another investigator was not very ethical. It would have been better, most clients believed, for their investigator to recommend the other one. Otherwise a lot of unnecessary money was spent in overhead costs. For instance, in Byrd’s case he planned to keep three dollars for every one he paid Bob Brown. But Bob knew nothing of this because he made a point of never getting involved in the financial arrangements between other investigators and their clients. His job, he believed, was simply to solve cases.

  And it was something he did with remarkable success.

  Other investigators had not always been so willing to take piecework or entire cases to Bob Brown. But over the thirteen years since Bob began doing private investigations, a nationwide network of investigators had come to trust his judgment like none other.

  Their original hesitation about the man had not been because of his ability. He was a brilliant investigator from the beginning. Their doubts had been because he wasn’t like other private investigators. He didn’t act like them, didn’t work like them, and certainly didn’t look like them.

  At forty-eight, Bob was a soft-spoken man who looked more like Bob Newhart than Magnum PI. He was known to bow his head and say grace in restaurants and he was active at his local church. Rather than sporty jackets or denim jeans, Bob wore a nondescript suit to work most days of the week. And in place of the usual sports car, Bob drove a white sedan which was almost as clean as he was. The only way to tell that Bob was a private investigator was the small-handled revolver tucked underneath his suit coat.

  Even if one used a tremendous amount of imagination, one would almost never be able to picture Bob running through alleys or up fire escapes or being shot at in dramatic chase scenes. For that matter it would have been difficult to imagine him climbing over fences and surveilling subjects in the middle of the night.

  Yet over the years, Bob had done all those things and then some. He laughed—softly and with a great deal of politeness—when someone had the nerve to ask him how he had mastered a profession that seemed so foreign to his nature.

  “It’s easy,” he would say. “I’ve been on both sides of the fence.”

  It was true. When Bob was a teenager he had no intention of investigating criminal activity. He was too busy partaking in it.

  Bob was born in 1932 and grew up in a suburb of Chicago that housed mostly low-income families. His father, a truck driver, was gone most of the time and his mother, Helen, was busy caring for her four children. So it was that Bob found it easy to slip away and spend a great deal of his afternoons with a shady group of neighborhood boys.

  By the time he was a teenager, Bob had joined a group of “bad” boys who wore black caps and jackets bearing a skull and crossbones. They talked of having a motto: “Death Before Dishonor.” Although theirs was not a gang of organized criminals, anyone in their neighborhood would have agreed on their potential to be so.

  From time to time, the police would catch the “Bad Boys” in a dark alley talking about secret things and perhaps planning violent crimes. Wanting to keep a handle on the situation, the officers would grab the boys, toss them into the patrol car, and beat them with rubber hoses. Then they would take them to the station and telephone their mothers.

  Apparently none of this bothered Bob much because when he was fourteen years old he and three older boys broke into a gun shop. Police responded to the scene and the boys took off on foot. Two of the boys were caught but Bob got away. For two weeks Bob looked over his shoulder, afraid he was going to be arrested at any minute. During that time his Uncle Jim, a police officer, had been watching Bob with a wary eye.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” he said one afternoon when they were alone.

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb! You were in on that break-in at the gun shop.”

  Bob paused too long and then, caught in the truth, hung his head in shame. “You going to take me in?”

  Jim resisted an urge to laugh. They would not arrest a fourteen-year-old boy whose role in such a crime had only been to look out for the others. But Bob didn’t know that and his uncle wanted him to be worried about the consequences of his actions. “I won’t,” he said. “I want you to go down to the station yourself and tell them what happened.”

  Bob looked horrified. “Uncle Jim, I couldn’t do that!”

  “Either that or I take you in myself.”

  And so reluctantly, Bob went to the station and met with a man who worked with his uncle. Jim had arranged the meeting and asked the other officer to scare the boy. For the next thirty minutes the officer seemed to ponder the notion of throwing Bob in jail. Finally, he let him go and warned him to leave the gang for good.

  For once, Bob listened.

  Even when he was dying to run with his old friends, he stayed out of trouble. Finally, he was old enough to join the army, where he was almost immediately recognized as a talented photographer. Within a few years he was sent to South Korea so he could participate in a covert operation involving his skills as a photographer. The U.S. Army would take over a section of land previously occupied by the Koreans and before the military would move in, Bob and his crew would go through the area taking pictures. The subjects were not pleasant. Most of the photos were of American soldiers who had been bound with barbed wire, gagged, and shot to death by Koreans.

  It was a highly secret mission and none of the pictures were released to the public until decades later. Bob’s superiors were thrilled with his work. Not just his brilliant eye for photography and detail. But the fact that he understood the importance of keeping the mission secret.

  When Bob left the army he married his first wife and throughout his twenties he worked his own photo studio, bringing in more than enough money to feed his wife and daughter, Vicky. When the pressures of running a studio became overwhelming, Bob and his family moved to Florida where, using the byline “Charlie Brow
n,” he became the photo editor for the Sarasota News.

  One of his assignments was to ride with the local highway patrol squad and shoot a photo essay. Bob’s excitement for the job had nothing to do with the pictures he took. Rather he was thrilled with the idea of police work. He had come full circle from his days in the suburbs of Chicago, all because his Uncle Jim had been willing to steer him on the right path.

  He received his training while still working for the newspaper and less than a year later he was hired by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Department. He spent most of his time investigating accidents, but from the beginning he wanted to be a detective. He worked his way up to a position in the crime lab and then, after a few enjoyable years, he quit because of a disagreement over pay.

  Bob spent the next few years working for the Orlando Sentinel as a photographer, but his heart was no longer in it. He had come to a crossroads and he considered his options.

  He had known life on the dark side, and he had developed an ability to work secretly, to photograph crime scenes, and to investigate. So, in 1966, now married to his second wife, Bob moved to Orlando and began working as a private investigator.

  As a means of supporting his private investigation business, Bob—always the entrepreneur—started a business called Central Security Police. He developed that business from a two-guard operation to one that employed three hundred guards in three cities. His guards were logging seventeen thousand hours a month but still he wanted to be a private investigator. That year, he sold the security business and with the proceeds put all his time and energy into private investigations.

  At first business was slow, but eventually the calls began coming in quite regularly. Most of his jobs involved domestic cases in which one spouse believed the other to be unfaithful. When this happened, Bob was uncannily successful at following the spouse in question and developing proof of the infidelity. His reputation grew and in time more clients found their way to his humble office.